Introducing Firoz Lalji
The LSE Institute for Africa is named in recognition of the remarkable contribution to African scholarship by Firoz Lalji and his family.
LSE’s Institute for Africa is named in recognition of the remarkable contribution to African scholarship by Firoz Lalji and his family.
Firoz Lalji was born in Uganda and came to the UK to study at LSE. He graduated from the School with a BSc in Economics in 1969.
After marrying Najma in Uganda, Mr Lalji and his family were forced to leave in 1972 after then dictator Idi Amin expelled people of Asian descent from the country. The family moved to Canada, where Mr Lalji built Kits Cameras into a chain of 225 stores across North America before selling the company in 1997.
Mr Lalji is now the Owner, President, and Chief Executive Officer of Zones Inc., a Seattle-based global provider of IT products and solutions to businesses, which he co-founded in 1988. Mr Lalji has grown the company into a global solutions provider and award-winning business enterprise. In addition to Zones, he owns the Fana Group of Companies, a real estate investment organisation that operates in the US and Canada.
Mr Lalji serves on multiple advisory boards, including the Board of Directors of the US Bank of Washington, the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington, the Pacific Northwest Ballet and LSE’s North American Advisory Board.
The Lalji family are longstanding supporters of the School, and their generosity has created numerous life-changing opportunities for African students and researchers at LSE. In 2007, they established the Firoz and Najma Foundation Scholarship, which continues today to offer support for masters’ degree students from Uganda and Belize. Through another visionary gift in 2010 they co-created the Programme for African Leadership (PfAL), which provides a bespoke programme of leadership development activities for about 80 African graduate students at the School each year and now has over 1,000 alumni in its network.
In June 2016, through the Lalji Family Foundation, Mr Lalji made a transformational gift of £10 million to create and endow the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa at LSE. The Centre later developed into the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa (FLIA) in order to build upon and expand its objectives. Mr Lalji’s historic generosity in establishing FLIA has significantly advanced African leadership and academic excellence at LSE and represents a powerful commitment to the transformative power of the School’s research and teaching.
The growth of the Institute's engagement and research is an inspiring example of what can be achieved in a short space of time.
Firoz Lalji Global Hub
In 2019, Firoz Lalji and his family made an extraordinary further commitment of £25 million to LSE to create the Firoz Lalji Global Hub, a state-of-the-art space for teaching, learning and community engagement located at 35 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. When completed, the Global Hub will be LSE’s first net zero carbon building and will serve as the new home for FLIA, the Data Science Institute and the Departments of Mathematics and Statistics.
The Firoz Lalji Global Hub will also provide the School’s first purpose-built facilities for executive education and host public discussions and lectures in its multipurpose Agora. The Global Hub will help advance lifelong learning, knowledge and understanding among the School’s alumni, friends and partners alongside our campus community of students and staff.
